I am very pleased to announce the launch of www.gospelcentereddiscipleship.com (GCD). The mission of GCD is to promote resources that make, mature, and multiply disciples of Jesus. Currently, all our content is free! This week we launched with:

• Exclusive excerpts from Everyday Church, the new book by authors to Total Church, Steve Timmis and Tim Chester
• Over a dozen articles on a range of discipleship issues from Gospel-centered Theology to the Gospel & Neighbors
• 3 Great eBooks on Organic Discipleship, the Holy Spirit, and Gospel-centered Discipleship

1. Don’t be Event-Driven,
2. Don’t be Evangelism-Driven,
3. or Social Action-Driven

In continuation of the series, How NOT to be Missional, this post examines some of the defects in Evangelism-Driven Missional church.

Evangelism-driven Mission. These are churches that focus almost exclusively on evangelism. Their view of the gospel leads them to see social action as optional. For them, mission is synonymous with evangelism, and evangelism is highly programmatic. They focus on training individuals through Evangelism training programs, Apologetics, and use of evangelistic tracts. What’s wrong with individuals learning evangelistic presentations, memorizing apologetic defenses, and using tracts.

• Evangelism-driven mission is often answer-based and heaven-centered. These churches training individuals and teams on “how to present the gospel” in a brief period of time. Typically, these programs, such as EE, are looking for the person being evangelized to offer a specific answer. For example, “If you died tonight and stood before God and he said: “Why should I let you into My Heaven?” what would you say?” Notice that the questions are answer-driven. The goal in this approach is to get someone to say the right answer, to believe the right facts, “Jesus died for my sins.” Lots of people in America can give this answer but show no true signs of faith. All they have is mere belief. Subsequently, the right answer baits them not with Christ, but with heaven. It is heaven-centered, not Christ-centered. In Evangelism-driven mission Christ is subordinated to the treasure of heaven, instead of heaven being subordinated to the treasure of Christ. The goal is heaven, not Jesus Christ. Answer-driven, Heaven-centered evangelism leads to nominalism and distorts the gospel. Evangelism-driven mission can undermine not advance the gospel.

• Evangelism-driven mission can be defensive and fact oriented. Training in apologetics has its place; however, when our approach to non-Christians is driven by apologetics we very often reduce people to projects. Apologetic mission can foster too much defense and too much offense because they aim at the head to the exclusion of the heart. They aim at changing someone’s mind but not their lives. Just because someone agrees with our facts and embraces our logic doesn’t guarantee true conversion. We need to be prepared, not only to defend the faith, but to love the person intelligently. Most objections to the gospel have existential, personal roots. If we can get beyond the arguments to the idols of the heart, we can show just how tremendously superior and satisfying Jesus is to whatever they love, desire, and pursue most!

• Evangelism-driven mission is often outdated and fails to contextualize. The Methods used are often pre-packaged and out-dated. Evangelistic programs falsely assume that our listeners still understand the meaning of  Sin, Christ, and Faith. But very often they  hear something very different, like Legalism, A Moral Teacher, and mere Belief. When we fail to express the gospel in context and vocabulary that our listeners can understand, we fail to share the gospel. Christ dated and contextualized himself to all kinds of people so that his message would make sense and connect with their deep needs for redemption. Using packaged illustrations and methods assumes a one-size-fits-all, but the Incarnation reminds us that the gospel is much more personal and dynamic.

• Evangelism-driven mission is individualistic. This approach to mission trains individuals, not communities. It reduces the gospel to a conversation between two people, without focusing on embodying the gospel in communities. Statistics have show that individuals are consistently converted to communities before they are converted to doctrines. Our methods are often doctrine-driven and individualistic. Jesus prescribed a kind of communal evangelism in John 17, where our community is so redemptive and rich that it points people to Jesus. Paul called for a distinctive discipleship in churches that set the community of faith forth as an example, as salt, as light in their cities, attracting others to them. Individualistic evangelism doesn’t create community because it doesn’t convert people to the church. It aims at converting individuals to a set of answers and to heaven. Evangelism-driven mission has very little to do with the Jesus we love or the Church he died for.

Adapted from the talks Conversion to Christ and Conversion to Mission from LEAD ’09.

LEAD 09 with Tim Chester and me went really well. Two days of stimulating talks, practical breakouts, and great conversations. Some of the audio is out with video to come. I thought the following audio that is currently available was

• Community as a Lifestyle
• Q&A on the difference between Belief and Faith

Acts 29 just published my new article on Conversion and Contextualization: Re-examining our Expectations of Gospel Change

Archbishop William Temple said: “Your religion is your solitude.” In other words, where your thoughts go in your silence determine your religion, your chief objects of devotion and joy. Do our thought wander to God or to self, to entertainment or to community, to hobbies or to service? Prayer is also an indicator of our religion. Where do our prayers wander? To self or to others? To our wants or to others’ needs? How are we praying? For whom are we praying? Three brief thoughts on prayer and mission:

• Conversation with God leads to conversation with man. If we really listen to God in prayer, we will hear him compelling us to talk to others about Him. If we adore him, we will draw others into that adoration.
• Missional prayer results in conversational mission. Praying for others will lead to conversing with others about the gospel, how it addresses all of life from anger to reconciliation with God. The more we ask God to bless, change, encourage, renew, and comfort others, the more we will find ourselves, blessing, encouraging, and comforting others with the hope of the Gospel.
• Vertical Christianity produces horizontal Christianity. If God is truly first, man will be a close second. Our faith in Christ will produce good works for others. Entertainment, hobbies, and the internet will not come before people. People will be second to God in our lives and in our prayers.

In this article Joe Thorn provides 8 areas that conversations can naturally lead to the gospel and provides suggested transitional statements!

According to Andrew Walls, the word “conversion” has been used in two main ways throughout Christian history.[1] One way denotes “an external act of religious change” that is a movement to Christian faith, individually or collectively. The other way refers to “critical internal religious change” within the Christian community. I am concerned with the latter. Walls notes that Western missionaries exported their understanding of conversion and made it the norm among non-Western peoples. For many, this included moving from “nominal” to “real” Christianity, “issuing in a holy life typically marked by a period of deep consciousness of personal sin followed by a sense of joyous liberation dawning with the realization of personal forgiveness through Christ.” Missionaries expected a similar pattern from those they evangelized.

What missionaries encountered “on the field” then is beginning to occur on our turf, now. Many church planters have a pre-Christian past that is quite Christian, and quite pietistic, informed by mid to late 20th century evangelicalism. Similar to the missionaries of the 18th and 19th centuries, our conversions relied heavily upon a prevailing Christianized culture, upon a certain basic knowledge of the faith.

However, in regions such as the Pacific Northwest and New England and in spiritually similar cities of the U.S we are now encountering a very dissimilar cultural climate. No longer can we assume a basic level of evangelical capital upon which the Spirit of God may act. Instead, we are engaging un-churched and resistant peoples who have either forgotten more than they know or have, in fact, never known Christianity. As a result, the conditions of conversion have changed, and like former missionaries we must reconfigure our understanding and expectation of how people convert, how disciples are made. Our goal is not to make converts and disciples of our 20^th century Christianity, but rather, to allow for new conversions—new creations—born by the Spirit in a 21^st century, post-Christian context. We must heed the failures of the past and call people, not to our experience of conversion, but to the experience of the Spirit’s converting, whatever that process may entail.

We hard-pressed to find a better missiologist in our day than Andrew Walls. Though Walls has not written prolifically, he makes up for it in the profoundity of his work. He has written two landmark books that explore the relationship between history, missions, and theology: The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in Transmission of Faith and The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History along with a number of articles.

Former missionary to Sierra Leone and Nigeria, Walls later served as director of the Centre for the study of Christianity in the Non-Western world, at the University of Edinburgh. In an article appearing in IBMR 2004, Walls explores the difference between proselytes and converts in the Early Church.

Given the fact there were a remarkable number of hits on my entry Two Great Commissions: Cultural and Evangelistic, I thought I would follow it up with a few more thoughts. In that post I simply raised the question: Are there two great commissions–the creation/cultural mandate (Gen 1.27-28) and the disciple-making mandate (Matt 28.18-20)?

There are, of course, both mandates in Scripture, but various theologies have neglected one or the other. One could argue that mainline liberal theologies, and perhaps liberation theologies, have neglected the command to make disciples of Christ, teaching them to obey all that Christ commanded, by focusing on social justice, environmental issues, and family (fruitful, multiply, have dominion). On the other hand, there are soul-centered theologies and movements that have advocated spirit salvation to the neglect of the salvation of body, creation, and culture.

This practical division can be resolved by addressing interprerations of the commissions from various angles. One particular angle has been advocated by Andrew Walls. In The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in Transmission of Faith Walls makes the simple but profound observation that the Great Commission is to make disciples of all nations. We get the word “ethnic” from the word for nations, indicating that Paul was not thinking in modernist geo-political terms, but instead of distinct cultural and ethnic groups. Jesus leaves his Jewish apostles and the Church with a command to make disciples of these non-Jewish ethnic groups.

In the Early Church, there was a tendency to make Gentile disciples into Jewish disciples, that is for them to take up all the cultural trappings of Judaism (circumcision, dietary codes, etc.). This is akin to early Protestant and Roman Catholic missionary attempts to Westernize indigenous peoples. Walls points out that Jesus did not command us to make disciples from all nations–that is to extract people from their culture and conform them to our “christian” culture. There is no single chrisitan culture, certainly not a sanctioned christian culture. The beauty of the Great Commision is that it presupposes the diversity and creativity of the cultural mandate. We are to make disciples of not from all ethnic groups. As Walls writes:

Conversion to Christ does not produce a bland universal citizenship: it produces distinctive discipleship, as diverse and variegated as human life itself. Christ in redeeming humanity brings, by the process of discipleship, all the richness of humanity’s infinitude of cultures and subcultures into the variegated splendor of the Full Grown Humanity to which the apostolic literature ponits (Eph 4.8-13). The Missionary Movement, 51

This means that to a significant degree, one’s culture should be preserved as a Christian. In fact, the teachings of Christ should lead to a person becoming an agent of cultural renewal, not out of hand rejection.

The original text of Matt 28.19 does not have an “of” or a “from,” but the construction lends itself to an of interpretation. Grammatically, a from interpretation is not a possiblity, hence the English translations–make disciples of all nations. To make disciples of all nations is to redemptively reaffirm the pre-fall cultural mandate to be fruitful, multiply, fill, rule and subdue the earth. The gospel renews culture and remakes its citizens to become a redemptive, creative, and culturally diverse influence in societies all over the world. This unique and diverse expression of the gospel of God throughout history and time redounds to his glory with each new encounter.